There is a question I keep coming back to: what happens to people who enter politics with good intentions, when the system they want to change starts changing them?
This week on The Debrief, I put that question to ANC MP Fasiha Hassan- Duma.
I have known Fasiha for a decade, since the Fees Must Fall protests. I was reporting on a generation of students who believed they could force South Africa to confront the injustice of who gets an education and who gets left behind.
Today, she sits in Parliament. The obvious question is whether that generation has changed the institutions it entered, or been absorbed by them.
Fasiha knows the criticism. She also acknowledges something politicians rarely volunteer: privilege helped determine which student leaders got opportunities afterwards.
“I think it was a result of privilege, compounded on privilege,” she told me.
We spoke about the safety net that allowed her to delay her degree to focus on activism, leaving corporate law without another job and the depression that followed.
But the hardest part of our conversation was about her continued belief in the ANC.
How do you defend a party to someone who has gone weeks without water? What does renewal mean to a resident who has heard the promises and still has to organise the basics themselves?
And how long can you keep fighting inside an organisation before the fight takes too much from you?
Fasiha admitted that she worries about what the political environment could do to her. She described the work as sometimes “soul crushing”, while explaining why she still believes staying is worthwhile.
You may find her answers convincing. You may find yourself arguing with your screen. There were moments when I pushed back because the distance between an explanation of systemic failure and the experience of living through it, is enormous.
We also talked about faith, anxiety and the indignity driving young people’s anger. Having helped lead a protest movement herself, Fasiha understands the impulse to tear a system down. Governing has forced her to confront the harder question of what comes next.
I wanted to understand how someone holds on to political conviction while confronting the failures of her own party.
That tension runs through this interview, and it is worth sitting with, whatever your politics.
Watch my conversation with Fasiha Hassan on The Debrief’s YouTube channel, and tell me what you think.
Qaanitah
